tv Business - News Deutsche Welle January 22, 2019 2:15pm-2:31pm CET
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discovered the a. lead. subscriber . documentary. i've. here we go again world leaders and business heavyweights descend on the swiss ski resort of davos but the annual meeting of the world economic forum now officially underway amid a gloomy backdrop of slower global growth and challenging international corporation . plus loopholes and tax havens european governments fail to enforce their own corporate tax rates the worst culprits are not the ones you would expect
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. this is it of your business as well come the annual world economic forum has opened in the swiss resort of davos over trade disputes international relations breaks it and fears the world's economy could tip into recession are said to dominate the meeting a flotilla of crises has kept several world leaders away this year including u.s. president all trump british prime minister tourism a french president and. founder and chairman of the world economic forum klaus schwab opened the gathering but urging delegates to focus on the future he held a number of young global leaders at the meeting and said it was time to listen to the young. first goes straight over to davos where my correspondent general to milan is standing by brazil's newly elected leader. will make is his debut on the world stage in just
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a few moments what can we expect from him. well in the absence of us president donald trump also now of course is expected to hold up the populist banner always very interesting in a gathering like davos which is a gathering of globalization's biggest offenders in any case he'll be making the case about brazil is open for business he'll be highlighting a pivot away from interventionist economic policies he'll be saying that brazil is such a liberal liberalize trade and foreign investment and that is something that investors will be very happy to hear bearing in mind that brazil of course is the world's ninth largest economy so the business delegation of us here is very much looking forward to what he has to say. you know the forum is now in full swing three hundred fifty sessions are set to take place one of the main issues delegates will be dealing with that well as you know the main or
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overarching theme here is globalization four point zero so how to ensure a cross border cooperation at a time of cross border crises and cross border challenges like a high tech digital revolution like climate change but of course corruption is also a very big topic here guard so to that end i spoke to the chair of transparency international that's an anti-corruption watchdog her name is miss dahlia rubio and i asked her whether globalization posed any more risks for the battle against corruption given of course that the advancement of technology makes corruption in the form of money laundering easier here's what she had to say. i think that technology is a tool and. use for the good purposes so technology can help in the fight against corruption in terms of facilitating information facilitating people to organize and to morning tor probably contracts for instance but it also facilitates the moving of money with the speed of
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a clique in the computer and this complicates money laundry investigations and also facilitate this kind of corruption so technology is not the tool that will solve all of the problems in terms of transparency but it depends on how we use technology for now you argue that one of those most important tools of course is education you've argued that our future generations have to be taught the values of anti-corruption how is it that you teach a future generation integrity i think that technology education is important i say long term. tool against corruption because we have to really build consensus song on what's wrong. and we have to do that at the same time that we are fighting to naming names and. exposing the cases of
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corruption and fighting for actual cases but we have to create a generation completely aware of the importance of transparency in order to have a better life it's not only economic cost that we are talking about when we talk about corruption we are talking of more poverty. less education less. or poor health care are so corruption affects every day life of every citizen and that's what we have to fight to correct in the ward thank you very much thank you. my college and talk today are of you know that the world economic forum and the big thing over there the topic which is talked about over and over again one of the founding blocks of the entire world economic forum you might say is free trade understand how the global exchange really works you don't need to listen to endless reports reports. found
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a better way through with chocolate you think something this innocent could be in the center of fierce debate over free trade switzerland is very famous for its chocolate but making it here is quite expensive swiss milk is twice as expensive in supermarkets as it is in germany to stop swiss chocolate makers from buying foreign cheaper milk and to protect domestic farmers the government introduced the shoddy gives it the chocolate it taxes foreign on recalls to a product and also processed ones making foreign chocolate just as expensive as suicide not only that but the swiss also subsidize chocolate exports making swiss chocolate more affordable abroad the world trade organization put a stop to that who is being phased out from this year on the w t o o's objective more free trade and more competition and of course that's the mantra of this entire forum here in the fourth. curator of other explaining
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a world trade. companies operating in the e.u. are paying far less tax than you and i might expect a new report by the european greens as highlighted the difference between a country's corporate tax rate and the average rate companies actually pay things a large part of the legal loopholes let's take a closer look at the biggest this discrepancy in europe can be found in luxembourg very tiny here over there their companies are officially taxed at twenty nine percent that actually do pay on average a mere two percent in france on the other hand the corporate tax rate is thirty three percent of firms that manage to pay only about half the amount seventy percent in europe's largest economy economy germany it's only slightly better as you can see there and something that might surprise you southern european countries it appears to be far less tolerant of tax loopholes now in greece for instance
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large firms are taxed at twenty eight percent and the average trade they pay is twenty four percent that's not too bad and the only only a small gap and italy companies pretty much forgot the rate they're supposed to now for more on this i'm now joined by molly scott council she's in the e.u. parliament area representing the green party of england and wales which was instrumental in bringing this study together it's got council if you add it all up the average corporate tax rate in the e.u. is twenty three percent and corporations actually pay closer to fifteen percent what is going on. well there's all sorts of different loopholes that corporations have persuaded national governments to introduce it's sort of like a competition that really between the different national governments and you know some corporate tax rates of really low like in luxembourg i think it's about two percent and in ireland it's twelve and a half percent and the u.k. and germany are still doing reasonably well and in the u.k.
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and about ninety percent in germany thirty percent so that's what we should be paying actually got relations are paying about twenty percent of their profits and the reason is they shift their profits away from countries that have a reasonable corporate tax rate to countries where it's a much lower rate or countries that give them special sweetheart deals and this is really unfair because countries just aren't getting the tax revenue they need to pay for public services and you know build the roads and pay for schools and hospitals and so on who are the biggest beneficiaries of these loopholes is it is multinationals digital companies the usual suspects. it is the usual suspects and quite a lot of them are actually the biggest us companies but the important thing to notice is it's always multinational companies in order to use these kind of info you need to be able to shift profits from one country to another and so what the study found and this is really disturbing is that actually the larger the company the lower the tax rate they pay and so the smallest companies that are really important parts of our communities actually pay the highest rates of tax and it's not possible for
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them to compete with the large multinational companies when they're paying much more of their profits in tax and they can't reinvest those profits to improve their businesses. what you see is not so much a matter of the e.u. it's been there it's in the hands of member states so what can be done by the e.u. to improve that situation. you're completely right and that's the biggest problem we face because it's really a failure of solidarity between member states so we have countries as i've said playing this sort of beggar thy neighbor call for a she started and certain countries he's blocking the proposals we need for example a proposal that is called country by country reporting so we can see clearly where companies are earning their profits that is being blocked at the moment by germany which which doesn't hold in a lot of other countries as well those and so we really need to see better cooperation by the member states and they try to hide behind the fact that you know it's european a european level that they're looking at so we need much more attention on the national governments to do it and if they don't succeed then we need to move the
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decision making absolutely unanimity process we can bring into play article one month six of the treaties which says that these decisions could then be made by a qualified majority voting process to stop some of the smaller countries that's an island blocking the progress we need while the scots card of their him e.u. parliament and for the green party thank you very much. and that's it for me and the business team here in the berlin thank you very much for watching and. do follow us on facebook and on twitter of the school business bob i.
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serial killers. cling to robber gangs. and ugly and mean prison feature of life in the one nine hundred twenty s. but legally mostly when they find most of the much traction out of the rivers. sometimes just body parts something like planes cause the german capital in a chokehold to the police for such cold. blooded mistakes and so many of us want to not really manage the condition here to randomly take a stance on crime scenes and the tiny circle of any such. criminals don't reckon with the. detective superintendent against cannot. be revolutionised his feelings of procedures and to study assures an extensive record system laying the
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foundations for modern lives we're just going to have too much was doing back then was basically the same answer today is a hopeless and that's why the first live metropolis of crime. starts january twenty ninth. on t.w. . plug. hi welcome to a new week of euro max i'm your host megan way and we're making our way around to all of europe's cultural hot spots so let's get right to it here's a look at what's coming up. in the spotlight metairie italy is one of this year's european capitals of culture. for the palate to take a cold area trip.
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